


Moths

by whosHelena (EyeofOrion)



Category: Orphan Black (TV)
Genre: Gen, but only brief mentions nothing graphic, mentions of Helena's past traumas, one day, one day i'll write something with an actual plot, through ludicrously extended metaphors, yet another short fic exploring one of my favourite characters
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-18
Updated: 2015-12-18
Packaged: 2018-05-07 10:25:40
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 766
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5453285
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/EyeofOrion/pseuds/whosHelena
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Helena is alone, and thinking of Sarah.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Moths

There are some phrases Helena has heard, and does not entirely understand. Sayings and proverbs and figures of speech. She pictures a figure of speech, a silhouette formed from someone’s voice. Tomas’s voice, perhaps, would be looming and hunched, with long reaching fingers like the shadows of trees’ sinister branches. The nuns’ voices would be thin and stretching like too many blades of too-tall grass, and Maggie Chen’s voice would be sure and inescapable but still ghost-like, and her sister’s voice would be

everything.

Sarah’s voice would be the mirror of her own, she thinks. The sounds of their voices are different but they come from the same lips, maybe. Sarah’s voice would be a silhouette she recognised like her own shadow. Even her hair was wild and mane-like these days, like Helena’s own. _Like peas in a pod_ (figure of speech: identical, the same).

Helena thinks about the Sarah-shadow sometimes when she is in the dark, which is often. All that is needed for shadows to exist is light, and things to stand in its way. And _I am the light_ , I am the light _I am the light_ and there are things in her way. So what is to stop her, the Sarah-shadow, from being here? Light can make shapes out of darkness but darkness cannot make light, ever, and Helena has a vague wordless feeling that it is not quite right that it does not work both ways. _Like night and day_ (figure of speech: different, opposite).

It is dark here, but not uncomfortably. It is cool in a way that only night can be, and the light comes in slivers. There is a moth trying to get in, or trying to get out, or trying to find the flame or hot glass surface it knows it must press itself against; it knows there must be one because there is light. It flutters fitfully against the window and against rough white wall with all its weightless might, but there is no flame; only cool grey light. But the moon’s light is not its own and there is no flame. _Like a moth to a flame_ (figure of speech: drawn towards).

Helena wonders, as she offers her fingers to the moth and touches the dusty smudges it leaves, if Sarah will come here. They are drawn together, she thinks, and the thought is as smooth and familiar as a well-travelled stone is to the sea. And if she is the light, Sarah is the moth. And she will keep coming back. Her sister will come back.

Sarah is chasing the moon now, so she is not here. But she will come, Helena thinks. She will come, and then she will leave, because Sarah always leaves, leaving behind another smudge as indelible as the fingerprints Helena idly wipes onto her white vest. Well. It was white, once.

Maybe she is not the moth, though. Of course – how could Sarah _not_ be the flame? Helena thinks of the times she has watched a place burn, and thinks of the times she has been with her sister walking a thin line, asking with her eyes for Sarah to love her back – there is a gun to her head or a knife to her thigh or a bullet _bullet_ to her chest – and perhaps the feelings are not so different. Perhaps when a feeling is as huge as that, there is not so much different. And Helena throws herself after Sarah’s light, all weightless wings, and she ends up… here. Making smudges on white walls by moonlight.

_Her hand on Sarah’s mother’s house’s window is her moth’s wing. Noiselessly she knocks; softly she claws at the light but it is not enough. She sees the things she does not have – Sarah; mother; house – and she cannot reach them. She remains quiet, and she leaves nothing but dust._

Helena presses her fingers to her lips – _old habits die hard_ (figure of speech: she does not know exactly what this one means) – and the moth’s dust is still on them, the closest she will get to tasting shadows. It does not taste like her sister’s voice, or like her own. It tastes like moth, and she regrets not thinking before she opened her mouth.

The light is less grey now, as the sun takes back the light that the moon borrowed and makes it real again. Now, though, the moth has gone. Perhaps, she thinks in a thought that does not form itself into words or even shapes, the creatures most desperate for the light only exist in the dark.

**Author's Note:**

> Title comes from [“Moths”](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gCzDFvoQq1Q) \- Racing Glaciers
> 
> Inspiration credit to Natalie [sharkodactyl](https://sharkodactyl.tumblr.com), whose interpretation of Helena I trust more than the writers’ tbh


End file.
